How do I get blender to stop creating so many files?
Any file with ".blend" and then a number is a backup file created by blender. This is not related to Save or Save As, which act the same as other program's implementations of them. Every time you save, the previous saved version gets loaded into ".blend1", so these extra files are your previous saves. If you ever wanted to use one of these previous saves you would rename the extension back to ".blend" and open it.

You can go to File> User Preferences> File and set Save Versions to 0 if you don't want these extra backup files: